The sad fact is, we can’t publish what we’re not submitted. Tor UK has an open submission policy – as a matter of curiosity we went through it recently to see what the ratio of male to female writers was and what areas they were writing in. The percentages supplied are from the five hundred submissions that we’ve been submitted since the end of January. It makes for some interesting reading. The facts are, out of 503 submissions – only 32% have been from female writers.
…So here’s the thing. As a female editor it would be great to support female authors and get more of them on the list. BUT they will be judged exactly the same way as every script that comes into our in-boxes. Not by gender, but how well they write, how engaging the story is, how well-rounded the characters are, how much we love it.
gender
Specious Quantification
Finally, most work in the psychological and social sciences suffers from a lack of conceptual rigor. It’s a bit sloppy around the edges, and in the middle, too. For example, “happiness research” is a booming field, but the titans of the subdiscipline disagree sharply about what happiness actually is. No experiment or regression will settle it. It’s a philosophical question. Nevertheless, they work like the dickens to measure it, whatever it is—life satisfaction, “flourishing,” pleasure minus pain—and to correlate it to other, more easily quantified things with as much statistical rigor as deemed necessary to appear authoritative. It’s as if the precision of the statistical analysis is supposed somehow to compensate for, or help us forget, the imprecision of thought at the foundation of the enterprise.
Be damned if I can remember where I read it, but it was just recently that I saw someone lamenting that “we talk about numbers for lack of any meaningful vocabulary to address these issues otherwise,” or words to that effect. I can’t help but feel something similar is going on when I read an article telling me that I should be concerned about the gender disparity among newspaper crossword editors.
Girls Who are Boys Who Like Boys to be Girls
Bros Before Prose (Slight Return)
As you’ve no doubt noticed, the Internet has struggling and/or failed writers standing around forlornly at the end of every URL off-ramp. It’s an unforgiving, stingy market for them. Thus I can’t realistically fault some poor fucker with an utterly useless English degree and an unread manuscript for grasping at any straw that promises a slight career advantage, even if it might seem unsporting, say, to invoke racist or sexist discrimination in order to shoulder one’s way closer to the head of the line. Whatever idealistic bullshit you may occasionally read about the moral benefits of fiction, writers, like anyone else, will do what they have to in order to get ahead.
It is tedious, however, to see the faux-civil-rights issue of gender imbalances in prominent literary outlets becoming an increasingly popular spectator sport, complete with all the snark and posturing typical of online drama. But whatever, fine; let’s just say you somehow manage to browbeat all the prestigious journals into presenting an equally-divided pie chart of male and female authors and reviewers in every issue. Then let’s say that a new study reveals that over the course of a year, male authors received positive reviews 58% of the time, while female authors only received positive reviews 39% of the time. Will that be accepted as just the way it goes, or will the same insinuations and accusations of sexism be leveled again in an attempt to game the refs? As you can guess, I’m inclined toward cynicism.
The Emperor’s Clean Clothes
Which is all to say, it’s seen as socially admirable and masculine for a man to be on diaper duty or to sous-vide a steak, but there are no closet organizing tips in the pages of Esquire, no dishwasher detergent ads in the pages of GQ. Considering the strides that have been made in getting men to share the labor in other traditionally female domestic areas, why has cleaning remained the final frontier?
At its most basic, a reason why a lot of men don’t want to clean is obvious: it’s not fun. The rewards of the other two traditionally female household tasks—childcare and cooking—are palpable. Your kid’s smile, a delicious meal. But not so with cleaning. Drew Magary, a Deadspin columnist and the author of the forthcoming parenting memoir Someone Could Get Hurt, says that men will never take the initiative and clean without being asked “because it sucks.”
…With all these obstacles to real gender parity of chores, what’s a working woman to do? Philosophy professor Alexandra Bradner suggests on the Atlantic’s website that couples sit down with a list of questions like, “Do I do half of the laundry and half of the dishes every day?” to figure out where they’re slacking off in comparison to their mate. This sounds exhausting and impractical. If I do one load of laundry, it’s easier for me to do the second rather than wait for my husband to mosey over. (Bradner also says that when men do traditionally female chores, they’re enacting “‘small instances of gender heroism,’ or ‘SIGH’s”—which, barf.)
Cooking meals and taking care of the crotchfruit are necessities; mopping and scrubbing are more like bonus options. Eating out all the time would be expensive, and society tends to frown on child neglect, but it’ll take a while for the accumulation of filth and vermin to actually become hazardous, and my experience suggests that most people, regardless of gender, lean more toward being lazy slobs than neat freaks.
I had to share a room with my brother until I was twelve. My parents used to jokingly call us Felix and Oscar over our diametrically opposed personalities. Once I finally convinced my mom that he was capable of having his own room without needing supervision (she’s always been an overprotective worrier), I started doing my own vacuuming, laundry, dusting, etc. and never looked back, while he turned every living space he inhabited into a landfill.
Honestly, I enjoy doing chores. It’s very satisfying to make messy things clean. Clutter affects my soul like being forced to listen to the strumming of a hundred guitars, each out of tune in a unique way. I can accept that life itself is chaotic and unruly and prone to make a mockery of all our best-laid plans, but I nonetheless have a deep-rooted psychological need to create simple, streamlined tidiness out of disorder within my living space. Without the opportunity to channel it like this, who knows how that control-freakishness might otherwise express itself?
This led to an amusing culture-shock moment with my girlfriend, who comes from a family where resentfully-performed chores serve as passive-aggressive pawns to be skillfully deployed for Machiavellian advantage on a psychological chessboard. In short, it took some convincing for her to accept that things here were exactly what they appeared to be, that I washed dishes, scrubbed toilets, emptied trashcans and hauled firewood because I had long ago accepted them as basic, inevitable aspects of my routine, aspects that I didn’t particularly feel strongly about one way or another. As I’ve said before, I consider myself mostly honest, not because of any burning devotion to abstract moral principles, but because I simply don’t have the patience or love of intrigue to bother weaving tangled webs of deceit. Way too much trouble. Same principle applies here. I’m a simple fellow, baby, I said. I see something that needs doing, and I do it. It’ll just gnaw at me if I try to ignore it. Besides, I did all this for years when I lived by myself, I’m in the habit of it, why should that change now? But why not ask or demand that the other members of the household do it? she asked. I stared at her like she was a madwoman.
Because, one, I’m a firm believer in the adage about doing things yourself if you want them done right. And two, I get far, far more satisfaction from getting something done when and how I want it done than I would from asking someone else to do it, waiting impatiently for them to get to it, which would no doubt be too late for my liking, and then being forced to restrain the urge to kibitz their efforts or brush them aside and do it my own damned self. A perfectly-divided pie chart of chore distribution doesn’t mean shit to me. I laugh at your weak, puny notions of dialogue and parity. I am the motherfucking tyrant of my domicile, the love-child of Alexander the Great and Mr. Clean, and the linoleum will run with the blood of any who dare oppose or hinder me (not for long, though, because that stuff’s hard to get up once it’s dried).
Gender heroism? What a laugh. Could that previous paragraph sound any more patriarchal?
An Exploration of Pain and Rage That is Also Playful and Comedic
Thus far, the Knife’s work has been marked by a certain fearlessness. Ever since their 2003 single Heartbeats brought them to a wider audience, Olof Dreijer and Karin Dreijer-Andersson have deliberately swum away from mainstream acceptance, unafraid of who they alienate along the way: endlessly snubbing awards ceremonies or using them to stage oblique protests, their brand of electronic music getting steadily more challenging.
Nor do they seem to be frightened of ending up in Pseuds Corner, as evidenced by Shaking the Habitual, their first proper studio album since 2006’s Silent Shout. It apparently began with extensive reading in feminist and queer theory, including Olof Dreijer taking a course at Stockholm University’s department of gender studies. The result takes its title from Foucault, touches on environmentalism and structuralism, quotes Jeanette Winterson, features two brief bursts of noise named after characters in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, and comes complete with a manifesto entitled Some Feelings in the Bellies of the Tankers Who Pass Us Making Sad Manic Bongs Like Drums.
It also seems that these issues have resulted in the Knife almost entirely jettisoning tunes from their work, and abandoning standard verse-chorus structures.
Oh, no. It’s bad enough that postmodern gender bullshit has made online atheism such an insane asylum over the last couple of years; why did it have to capture the brilliant minds behind The Knife and Fever Ray, too? Why? Whyyyyyy?
The idea of authenticity in music is something that’s been bothering the Knife ever since they started getting deeper into feminist theory (Olof signed up for a course at Stockholm University’s department of gender studies, while Karin borrowed his reading list). “We’ve tried to find ways to implement what we have learned in queer theory,” explains Olof. “We are really into criticising this idea that there are some sounds that people would consider more authentic than others. And the way we’d do that would be to get sounds that you don’t really know where they come from. It could be a synthesised sound or a voice or even an animal. You don’t really know about the origin.”
It still holds true for some people that if they can’t picture anyone physically singing or playing an instrument, they can’t relate to the music emotionally. “Well, we are constructed to like certain things,” he continues. “We’ve been teaching a bit at this summer camp for teenage girls who want to make electronic music, and there we often talk about this idea of quality in music and what informs our ideas of what is supposed to be good and bad music. You know that music history is written by privileged white men, so we can ask ourselves how important it is to repeat their ideas.” Bet they don’t teach that at the Brit School.
It sometimes feels as if the Knife’s feminist theory has an answer for everything. Don’t like their new tune-free tracks? That’s because you’ve been culturally conditioned to enjoy the decadent concept of melody.
Update: It ended in tears:
The Knife played their final show, entitled “Post-Colonial Gender Politics Come First, Music Comes Second”, on November 8, 2014 at the Iceland Airwaves Festival in Reykjavik, Iceland.
Bros Before Prose
What I’ve come to realize, thanks to VIDA and the Count, is that my feminist convictions do not make up for the low number of books by women I’ve reviewed. Not yet. Good intentions are not enough. It’s people like me, people aware of the persistent sexism of our society, who need to do a better job of promoting books by women. To ignore the gender disparity in publishing is to perpetuate it. I can’t do that any longer. Instead, I will continue to champion all of the books I love in every way I can—only now I will do so with a clearer understanding of just how far we still have to go in building the literary community that we all deserve.
You’ve gotta pity these poor bastards. I mean, imagine being so insecure, so incapable of contemplative self-confidence, so desperate for some sort of tangible proof of your non-sexist or non-racist intentions that you attach this overweening significance to whichever metric you can get your hands on. Yes! That’s it! 43% of the music I listen to is created and performed by non-white non-North Americans! 51% of the books I read are by female authors! Woohoo, I’m winning at cosmopolitanism! Winning like Charlie Sheen! The numbers don’t lie!
(Would it fuck with their heads too badly if someone were to suggest that obsessing over stats and pie charts is so typically white male?)
One thing I didn’t mention the last time this topic came up: I find it interesting that it’s just matter-of-factly assumed that male reviewers and readers would naturally gravitate toward the writings of other males. Why? Because of pheromones? No, seriously, every time I read one of these whinges, that’s presented as the default, the unconscious state of things requiring education to overcome: men naturally consider other men’s writing to be superior to women’s even when it’s “clearly” not. Conversely, though, white knights like this guy do seem to believe that women possess some sorts of unique ways of knowing, experiencing and communicating, which suggests that there’s very little daylight between their views and those they scorn, like, say, V.S. Naipaul. The narcissism of small differences, indeed.
But leaving aside the extremely tendentious attempt to interpret everything from ideas to language as “gendered” by society, doesn’t this quite literally — not figuratively, but literally — beg the question? Doesn’t it, in other words, presuppose the existence of a more-or-less zero-sum struggle between men and women for power, status and resources, one which all the participants are instinctively aware of and one where their natural inclination is to stand in solidarity with their fellows? In other other words, aren’t you simply finding the “proof” you set directly out in search of to begin with, that men see themselves as directly competing against women in the war of language and ideas because misogyny that’s why? In a world of unlimited writerly wants and scarce publishing resources, we dudes are all brothers of different mothers, amirite?
Oh, well. This is just one of those things that gets magnified far out of proportion to its actual importance, most likely due to the massive overrepresentation of frustrated lit majors tweeting away on the social web, bitter over their lack of an actual literary career. The real fun will begin when the other dozen genders plus the otherkin start hollering about how they’re being systematically overlooked by the cisbinary publishing industry, and the postmodern Ouroboros will finally finish what it started.
It Was Quite the Display of Girl Power
No, the insightful criticism isn’t that they didn’t artificially include a black woman, it is that they artificially excluded Asian women– that this photo could only be made by actively denying a reality: among women, Asian women are proportionally overrepresented in successful positions, especially tech jobs, especially Silicon Valley, and yes, Apple Maps, India is in Asia. Putting this shot together is like staging an NBA publicity photo without any neck tattoos or handguns. “What?” When I was in my 3rd year of medical school and we all had to select our tax bracket, the Asian women went into surgery, ophthalmology, or the last two years of a PhD program, you know where the borderline sleeves went? Pediatrics, which I think is technically sublimation but I’m no psychiatrist. The logic was straightforward: they wanted kids, and, unlike surgery, pediatrics offered future doctor-moms a bit of flexibility, while the Asian women apparently didn’t worry about working late because their kids would be at violin till 9:30.
This porno, for the Time et al demographic, cannot allow this bit of reality to be shown, because the moment you see Padmakshi or “Megan” at the table it is too real, it undermines the entire sexism thesis and suggests that something else may be going on, it’s like watching an awesome gangbang and suddenly noticing all the empty Oxycontin bottles and that they’re speaking Serbian. “That just makes it hotter!” I just logged your ip address. This doesn’t mean Asian women don’t experience sexual discrimination, it means that when an Asian woman succeeds, the other women in the office don’t get to experience sexual discrimination, so they’re left only with sexual harassment. Read it a couple of times, it’ll make sense and you won’t like it.
It’s always good to read a new Last Psychiatrist post, especially after a week filled with the looking-glass surreality of Donglegate and the equally hilarious spectacle of Peezus Myers, having spent so long staring into the abyss, experiencing the abyss staring back into him.
I Will Count All the Ratios, and Count Them All Again
This is not the first time I’ve seen one person’s personal pledge treated as a targeted judgment against other people. It’s not the first time I’ve seen men ignite the argument by being defensive. I find the argument of gender blindness suspect. I find most arguments about whether gender impacts someone’s reading choices oblivious at best, and a bunch of dressed up, internalized, misogynistic malarky at worst, like we’re some kind of post-feminist society and people making these claims sit on the board of High Overlords of Genre Progressives.
I rarely see general disinterest. I rarely see things like “That’s cool, bro! Good luck!”, followed, in my magical fantasy land, with some recommendations of books by ladies attached. What usually results from these “I just read whatever I want!” proclamations is more insidious. “I don’t see/care about gender.” gets attached as an faux-progressive rider and the resulting calls of bullshit on that antiquated gem leads to these people just chomping at the bit to prove they just read what interests them. They claim they don’t make it about gender in exceedingly creative, offensive verbal acrobatics that erases the very real struggle a lot of women in genre communities are still dealing with. So we have to live with the bile of defensive arguments foaming from the mouths of otherwise level-headed reviewers as they transform into Misogyny Monsters and start flipping tables because they have never learned to stop and think about why their first response is to grow defensive or disclaim their position. It’s as if they’ve never learned to stop and listen. Women can face problems in every step: getting published, read, listened to. It can be a trial to be heard as widely as their male counterparts; to write, or do, or say something and watch everyone walk past it for the same thing written, done or said by one man, or two, or three. Listening is a key component in learning new and fascinating things about people who have different life experiences from you. Listening is a progressive act. Gender blindness is not.
And the obvious response is, what happens when someone listens, considers, and still disagrees with you? Haha, trick question. In this context, “listen to the women” means “shut up and let the self-appointed arbiters of women’s interests lecture you until you agree.” Peezus Myers, with his usual ham-fisted, dunderheaded subtlety, said it flat-out: by definition, there can be no rational grounds for disagreement with his social-justice interpretation of feminist truth. Sorry, dudebro, but your hyperskeptical objections have already been anticipated and defined out of valid existence.
No doubt she’d disagree, but I hear what she’s saying. I’ve heard it before, expressed without the snark so as not to make anyone feel defensive, and yet I disagreed with it then, too. I simply do not feel that achieving gender parity in terms of authors getting published and reviewed in high-profile outlets is an important, let alone morally significant, issue. As it stands, it may not be fair, and it may not be a pure meritocracy, but it’s not like it’s a civil rights issue either. A 50% ratio of female authors whose SF/F books get reviewed by influential journals is not going to improve anything beyond the self-satisfaction of guilt-ridden people who yearn for such tangible metrics to reassure themselves that they aren’t unwittingly contributing to someone’s oppression. I feel that fixations with imposing such perfectly-divided pie charts onto various human endeavors, especially art, is rationalism taken to a ridiculous extreme. I don’t believe that the trendy cultural-studies obsession with privilege and axes of oppression has any relevance outside a broad, abstract context of dry statistical analysis, and most certainly not on the level of individual preference. And most damning of all, I don’t accept that my maleness predisposes me to those opinions, nor do I accept the unfalsifiable, Freudian-style attempts to read my mind and tell me why I really think like that. I don’t care in the slightest if that’s a “progressive” stance, all I care is that it’s not deluded.
Seeing this kind of argument actually offends me. I mean, whether we’re talking about genre fiction or lit-rah-chur, it’s all on an artistic continuum to me. Popular art can be just as capable of opening up wide vistas of imagination for fans. There’s no telling what sort of prose or imagery will leave a profound impression on an individual reader, or how exactly it will inspire them. And so, to see it treated as if the most important thing about a novel is the gender of the author or the protagonist, as if the main incentive to identify with a novel is to claim the author or the hero as a member of your “team”, as tally marks on an irrelevant scoresheet, irritates me to no end. It’s no less crass or philistinic than seeing some hack blog-pundit analyzing a blockbuster movie in order to claim it as a parable in support of whatever fucking news-cycle effluvia is currently occupying the web’s ephemeral attention span.
Let me take a little detour here: I listen to a lot of music. Much of it could be loosely placed on the “rock music” family tree, especially when I was younger and tended to favor British/American groups of young guys in four-or-five-man bands with guitars and keyboards. Even then, though, I was often frustrated by the way my musical taste was dismissed by uninterested people like my parents, who said it was all just a bunch of noise. What was wrong with them? How could they not hear or feel the obvious differences between aggressive thrash metal and mainstream hard rock? How could they lump bluesy rockers in with punks? How could they be so blind and deaf to the liberating, consciousness-expanding nuances that I perceived everywhere?
Nowadays, my palette is much wider, and even though the common denominator of a lot of my taste could be described as popular music performed by bands or singer/songwriters, the variety in styles and sensibilities makes a mockery of such crude reductionism. There are entire worlds contained in my musical collection. Only a fatuous, facile fuckwit, or a writer for a shallow pop-culture blog, but I repeat myself, would think that all music made by white and/or male artists somehow presents a monolithic perspective.
It’s no different when it comes to books. It’s an exotic fetishizing to see, say, female or black authors as in possession of some unique perspective by simple virtue of their gender or race, as if they’ve all had the same experiences across the board, as if those experiences are so specific to one demographic that no amount of sympathetic imagination by an outsider could approximate them.
You Will be Hollow. We Shall Squeeze You Empty and Then We Shall Fill You With Ourselves.
One of my frequent criticisms of religious believers has been the dishonest way in which they profess to humble themselves before a transcendant ideal which, upon closer examination, turns out to be nothing but a projection of their own narcissism. The “true” message of Christianity, for example, amazingly, incredibly, shockingly turns out to be identical with the temperament and culturally shaped beliefs of the speaker. They proclaim themselves lowly servants of a greater whole upon which they nonetheless assert unrestrained creative control. They feign innocence while digging up buried treasure which they themselves planted under cover of psychological darkness.
It’s not much different when it comes to identity politics. White social justice warriors pride themselves on their magnanimity upon ceding “control of the dialogue” to representatives of marginalized groups. If you think you detect a conveniently self-fulfilling prophetic aspect to how those “true” representatives of black interests, feminist interests, etc. are chosen, never fear. There’s a white guy over there with polls, graphs, statistics and unimpeachable rationality who has already figured it all out for you.
Multiculti Satrapy
But how do we define a community? That question has been all too rarely asked in the debate about cultural diversity and community empowerment. In fact, much cultural policy as it has developed over the past two decades has come to embody a highly peculiar view of both diversity and community. There has been an unstated assumption that while Britain is a diverse society, that diversity ends at edges of minority communities. The claim that The Satanic Verses is offensive to Muslims, or Behzti to Sikhs, or indeed that Jerry Springer: The Opera is offensive to Christians, suggests that there is a Muslim community, or a Sikh community or a Christian community all of whose members are offended by the work in question and whose ostensible leaders are the most suitable judges of what is and is not suitable for that community. All are viewed as uniform, conflict-free and defined primarily by ethnicity, culture and faith. As a Birmingham Council report acknowledged about the council’s own multicultural policies, ‘The perceived notion of homogeneity of minority ethnic communities has informed a great deal of race equality work to date. The effect of this, amongst others, has been to place an over-reliance on individuals who are seen to represent the needs of views of the whole community and resulted in simplistic approaches toward tackling community needs.’ The city’s policies, in other words, did not simply respond to the needs of communities, but also to a large degree created those communities by imposing identities on people and by ignoring internal conflicts and differences. They empowered not individuals within minority communities, but so-called ‘community leaders’ who owed their position and influence largely to the relationship they possessed with the state.
…Thanks, however, to the perverse notion of diversity that has become entrenched, Shabbir Akhtar has come to be seen as an authentic Muslim, and the anti-Bezhti protestors as proper Sikhs, while Salman Rushdie and Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti are regarded as too Westernized, secular or progressive to be truly of their community. To be a proper Muslim, in other words, is to be offended by The Satanic Verses, to be a proper Sikh is to be offended by Behzti. The argument that offensive talk should be restrained is, then, both rooted in a stereotype of what it is to be an authentic Muslim or Sikh and helps reinforce that stereotype. And it ensures that only one side of the conversation gets heard.
Many cultural anthropologists believe that they have deep normative disagreements with Jared Diamond. In reality I think the chasm isn’t quite that large. But the repeated blows ups with Diamond gets to the reality that cultural anthropology has gone down an intellectual black hole, beyond the event horizon of comprehension, never to recover. It has embraced deconstruction, critique, complexity (or more accurately anti-reductionism) and relativism to such a great extent that whereas in many disciplines social dynamics and political power struggles are an unfortunate consequence of academic life, in cultural anthropology the fixation with power dynamics and structures has resulted in its own self-cannibalization, and overwhelming preoccupation with such issues. Everyone is vulnerable to the cannon blast of critique, and the only value left sacred are particular ends (social justice, defined by cultural anthropologists) and axioms (white males are oppressive patriarchs, though white male cultural anthropologists may have engaged in enough self interrogation to take upon themselves the mantle of fighting for the rights of the powerless [i.e., not white males]) which all can agree upon.
I’m put in mind of white male progressives using racial epithets to attack uppity black conservatives in the name of tolerance, or “mansplaining” the correct understanding of feminism to women who adorably insist on worrying their pretty little heads about big ideas. Their activism is, like Malik said, rooted in and reinforcing of stereotypes. Honestly, if you don’t allow the circular reasoning to make you dizzy, it’s hard to avoid concluding that a significant percentage of social justice warriors are in it for their own therapeutic reasons more than anything else.
Don’t Stop Believin’
Joy provides emotional closure, which we never got after 9/11 and the distraction in Iraq. Maybe this joy at Osama Bin Laden’s death can provide that for us. And maybe then we can finally have politicians say that we won, and so we can finally shut down the illegal prisons, the ongoing war, and maybe even the ridiculous security theater at airports. But if we scold and silence the joy away, we’ll never get a chance to find out.
That was AmandaPanda almost two years ago, urging us to be reborn in the cleansing blood of another Middle Eastern apocalyptic lunatic, and needless to say, all her predictions came true despite the best nonexistent efforts of the scolds and killjoys, because if they hadn’t, we’d have to conclude that she’s still as much of an idiot as she’s ever been, and we can’t have that, now, obviously.
Now, I had vaguely resolved this year to stop wasting time reading empty-calorie sites like Salon, Slate, the Atlantic Wire, FfTB, etc., but I was tricked by Jacob into clicking on her latest column, unable to resist finding out who the hell could be so goddamned dumb as to write this:
Hopefully the greater inclusion of women into the military will help us all see that violence and war is learned behavior—it’s not inevitable. Women entering combat roles isn’t feminism acquiescing to male values, and women don’t have a unique duty to overturn the glorification of violence and power that leads to war.
Ahahahaha. “Hey… why did they let so many of us in?“
The Cut Is Very Tough, You Bit the Big Bluff. Take Another Bite.
The problem isn’t with women in the Senate, but rather its celebration, which these dummies blindly participate in. Is it putting on a face for the American public, the way the first face I see on Goldman Sachs’s website is a black woman? Is it cosmetic? She’s probably proud, she should be proud, that she made it to GS, but for the rest of blacks and women, what is the significance? It may be regressive to ask this, but it is illuminating: “hey…. why did they let so many of us in?”
This is part of a larger, systemic problem with the way power has shifted not from Group A to Group B, but from ground up to top down, and top down works in a very specific way: it concedes the trappings of power while it retains the actual power.
And so, while browsing various sites, I likewise can’t help but notice all the chattering about The Significance of women in combat. As with gays and atheists, the problem isn’t with the right to participate, but with the dummies celebrating it.
And then I watch the Daily Show, and see Jon Stewart yukking it up with some drone — ‘scuse me, unmanned aerial vehicles, they’re not stupid — expert from M.I.T., who assures us, in between jokes about FedEx and UPS delivering packages like bombs, or Death Stars, that the military has lots of regulations, even an entire conference which spends a lot of time discussing the ethics of remote warfare. Oh, good. You wouldn’t want to belong to any club that couldn’t discuss Augustine and Aquinas like civilized folk, after all.
And Br’er Rabbit smiles contentedly in his briar patch.
Privilege Midden
Privilege-checking plays into the dangerous postmodern fallacy that we can only understand things we have direct experience of. In place of concepts like empathy and imagination, which help us recognise our shared humanity, it atomises us into a series of ever-smaller taxonomical groups: working class transsexual, disabled black woman, heteronormative male.
…Privilege becomes an inescapable feedback loop: any attempt to critique privilege-checking is met with the retort: “You’re privileged enough to have the luxury not to think about privilege.” But that’s not it. I’ve always been aware that as a child of a white, middle-class family, I have life easier than some people – but that’s precisely what drives me on to seek social justice for those less fortunate than myself. Prejudice exists. We live in a radically unjust world. But turning our personal circumstances into some sort of pissing contest achieves precisely nothing.
In theory, it can be a useful analytic framework. Prejudice can be more subtle than outright discrimination; many core assumptions can be taken for granted until someone else calls them to your attention. But in everyday practice, as evidenced all over the blogosphere, it barely amounts to more than an acceptable version of ad hominem argumentation (possibly even the genetic fallacy). Accusing someone of unchecked privilege is a way to avoid answering any of their arguments on the merits. It’s a way of keeping conversations on a short leash and choke chain, ready to be quickly yanked back into line. I have yet to see an accusation that allowed for any response other than a groveling apology — attempting to argue one’s innocence is dismissed as “doubling down,” the equivalent of Freudian “denial”. All it does is further confirm one’s guilt (especially in the zealous eyes of the newly-converted; I mean, all I could think of here was a Calvinist preacher delivering a pulpit-pounding, fire-and-brimstone sermon on original sin).
But again, it’s not that the analysis is completely invalid, it’s just that, ironically, privilege is often most clearly demonstrated by those so quick to appoint themselves the arbiters of correct thought and behavior.
…adding, Freddie continues insightfully addressing the topic:
…The essentialism rises from the absurdity of speaking about nonwhite people as some sort of unified bloc.
I brought up the fact that, if I’m going to abandon any particular perspective on race myself and merely adopt the positions of nonwhite people, I might choice nonwhite people whose views are deplorable. I brought up Allen West in our conversation. My point about Allen West is simple: when people say “you should give up your racial arguments and simply listen to what nonwhite people say,” they are suggesting that all nonwhite people have the same views. Allen West is black, and he is an Islamophobe. So when he says vile things about nonwhite Muslims, am I obliged to keep quiet, because of his greater understanding of race and racism?
Q dug deeper: “I explicitly specified the kind of people that would be valuable to link and implicitly excluded people who’ve internalized white supremacy to anti-black, racist ends.”
Which is to say (explicitly) that no nonwhite person could arrive at opinions on race that Q finds objectionable unless that person had internalized white supremacy. This is the height of liberal essentialism, the need to look on nonwhite people not as people, with individual agency and fully developed consciousness, but as symbols of purity, which dehumanizes and infantilizes them. I will admit to not always knowing exactly what is right or wrong when we talk about race. But I am damn sure that saying that nonwhite people can only disagree with me because they’ve internalized white supremacy is a terribly ugly idea.
Yes, precisely. And thus you encounter the spectacle of progressives like DougJ and TBogg, who will snark about those racist Tea Partiers all day long, brazenly calling a black conservative a “lawn jockey” and “Fox’s house liberal” with no hint of shame. Boy, we’ve already decided what’s best for you; now shut your mouth and get back where you belong. You owe us. Or that of PZ Myers, who uncharitably interprets remarks by a prominent feminist as being “sexist” before proceeding to instruct her on proper feminist concerns. (Performed by a member of the out-group, this would be dismissed as what the cool kids call “mansplaining”.) It’s taken for granted that the diversity of racial/gender viewpoints they claim to want to solicit will be in agreement with their own; the FTBers, I’m sure, have no interest in hearing about concerns from the communities of conservative Latino Catholics, homophobic black Baptists, or women opposed to abortion unless they deign to patronize them with explanations of how they are simply the victims of white supremacy-induced false consciousness.
A more cynical person than me might say that to certain white male social justice warriors, women and racial minorities are merely exotic vessels for holding and transporting beliefs and opinions which have already received the SJW seal of approval. A more knowledgeable person might even be able to reference which branch of critical theory would describe this itself as inherently racist/sexist.
Shouting “Bigotry!” In a Crowded Internet
Perhaps unintentionally, Benson makes a strong case that something other than misogyny may be at work here, when she asks rhetorically if I would make the same argument about race. I would, yes, because I do not believe that the fact that the secular community does not contain the precise percentage of blacks, Latinos, Asians, and Native Americans as in the general population, means that all of us in the secular community are racists, explicitly or implicitly. A variance from perfect demographic symmetry does not necessarily correspond to racist attitudes. It just means that the world is not perfectly divided up according to population demographics, and people have different interests and causes. There is nothing inherently bigoted, racist, or misogynistic in the fact that the demographics of the secular community do not reflect those of the general population (in gender, in age and socio-economic class, or in height, weight, or any number of other variables for that matter), so short of some other evidence of bigotry, racism, and misogyny, there is no need to go in search of demons to exorcise.
Oh, I feel his pain. And let me tell you, that last link to the Austinist article by Terry Sawyer, man; if I ever write anything that good, that pitch-perfect, I might just have to retire from blogging, because it would be only downhill from that point on.
He Blindsided Her With Science
Watson’s talk is peppered with snark and sarcasm. Also, it should be clear by now she seems to have spent very little time researching the topic. She doesn’t treat the topic seriously. I do not merely mean that she does not take evolutionary psychology seriously— but the entire topic, including her own contentions, is more performance art than education lecture.
Watson sees evolutionary psychology as being on par with creationism (she makes this comparison at 8:28) and therefore finds it fit for ridicule. She even says mocking it “never gets old”. Even so, what about the impact evolutionary psychology might have? That seems less than amusing. For the sake of argument, let us imagine everything Watson believes is correct: Those who conduct research in the field are mostly misogynists who are dedicating many years to the pursuit of justifying harmful stereotypes and oppressing women. They’ve succeeded in compromising peer review, and the professional journals which publish them are mouthpieces of the patriarchy and scientific rigor is gone. They’ve infiltrated the top universities in the world- UCLA, Harvard, MIT, Oxford, Yale, and so on. They’ve established growing departments at said locales and have their own conferences and ever-larger presences at others. They’ve even succeeded in having much of their literature and research perspective accepted by mainstream social science.
If I believed that all of this were true, I would be horrified. The potential harm to society and to behavioral science would be almost incalculable. Were I to give a talk on it or write about it, I would dig deep. I would cite mainstream sources so that no one could dismiss me as cherry-picking. I would conduct or locate reviews of dozens or hundreds of studies, instead of citing one or two in tabloid newspapers easily dismissed as outliers, or taking the word of an author trying to sell books. I would read full published papers and foundational literature, not blurbs from the Telegraph about unpublished studies so that my understanding would become robust and accurate. I wouldn’t make an unserious, sarcastic tone my main presentational style because the stakes would be so high, the human cost so tragic.
Watson wants us to believe this great dark power is working, inhibiting social justice, hurting real people and the advancement of science, and that it is entertaining to talk about. She says (for example) that it is working to justify rape. To make rape OK. …But hey, no big deal, right? Not big enough to research properly or to stop making jokes about for two minutes. This flip attitude lacks empathy, and I find it ethically repugnant. If even close to true, her claim isn’t funny. It deserves real skeptical inquiry and serious investigation and she gave it none of this.
…So, I formally criticized a theory in evolutionary psychology that has stood for years. I did it, in part, because I love evolutionary psychology. I know that it’s a good science and that a good science gets better with robust criticism. I am excited to be able to play a tiny part in that, if I can. It was also an exercise in skepticism toward something I cared about. We need to engage in this kind of skepticism because as we try to figure out how the world works and how it got to be the way it is, commitments to ego and politics tend to get in the way. All of her skep-nomenclature trappings to the contrary, I do not think that Rebecca Watson understands this.
Oof. If this were a boxing match, the referee would have stopped it long before this point.
Snark, sarcasm, performance art, ego and politics. Coincidentally enough, those are the very things that often make reading the blogosphere such an unenlightening, unrewarding chore.